Help Scout Blog

HelpScout (https://www.helpscout.net/). Brilliant piece of software built by a bunch of people that really care. Regular new features and improvements, an intelligent help desk that just gets out of the way, and docs for customer self-service (they have a private option for docs which we use for internal knowledgebases too)

At iDoneThis, we have several shared email inboxes (Helpscout is fantastic for this: http://helpscout.net). What ends up happening is that most of our emails are processed out of shared inboxes, which makes it easier to respond in batch (as Harj points out) while still showing responsiveness (because people batch at different times). We end up hardly using our personal company email addresses.

Help Scout - Java engineer - [REMOTE or LOCAL] Headquarters: Boston | http://www.helpscout.net Help Scout is a help desk that is completely transparent to customers yet highly useful for teams that utilize it. It works by parsing all incoming customer emails and provides a consolidated mailbox view allowing multiple users in the backend to interact with customers, assign to other team members and a whole host of other features such as statistical reports, automated workflows and integrated 3rd party services. I work as one of the Java programmers at Help Scout alongside 7 other senior programmers. It's a great company to work for, everyone is really passionate about what we are offering to our customers and code quality. The majority of the engineering team work remotely and are based in the US (except myself in Barcelona). We communicate 90% of the time via Slack and the position really allows you to 'own' your area of expertise, no long meetings, fast development and above all you are trusted to make the right decisions. If any of that interests you then you can apply here: http://help-scout.workable.com/jobs/24579 or read more about the company here: http://www.helpscout.net/about/ Feel free to reach out to me on this thread or via my work email [email protected] if you have any questions about the role! Technologies we use: - Java 7 and 8 - Play framework - MySQL, MongoDB. Solr - RabbitMQ

I work at Help Scout, and it's a great hosted sass tool. But you shouldn't just pick the first one you hear about. I wrote a guide to making the right choice of help desk tool for your own situation: https://www.helpscout.net/blog/choosing-help-desk-software/ Useful to think through before you invest time or money.

Here are my notes on possibilities, for if we ever actually get a CRM: 1. HelpScout -- http://helpscout.net -- Seems nice 2. SupportBee -- http://supportbee.com -- Almost want it for the name alone but we got an anti-recommendation from a friend at Gratipay 3. BeSnappy -- http://besnappy.com -- Possibly recommended by patio11 but then I heard they shut down? 4. Intercom -- http://intercom.io -- Recommended by Matt at HookFeed 5. FreshDesk -- http://freshdesk.com -- Recommendation from friend at Gratipay 6. Front -- https://frontapp.com/ -- Lots of funding and big names behind it; Patrick Collison recommened it now too (coupon code for 3 months free: startuppack) 7. FogBugz -- http://blog.fogcreek.com/fog-creeks-email-workflow/ -- Blog post by Fog Creek about what they do

Our approach may not be scalable (and may not fit into your worldview) but having our developers do API support for us serves two important purposes: 1. Giving our clients the best possible technical support 2. Making our developers feel the pain (and joy!) of clients using what they built. I can't think of a better way to motivate developers to fix what's sub-optimal, share in the success of a job well done, and come up with new ideas to help our customers. We're not alone in this strategy: http://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-pain/ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch14_Feel_The_Pain.php

We use a bunch of tools at Zapier but some of our favorite are: - P2 WordPress theme from Automatic: http://p2theme.com/ - Sqwiggle: https://www.sqwiggle.com/ - Trello: https://trello.com/ - GitHub: https://github.com/ - Campfire: https://campfirenow.com/ - Zapier: https://zapier.com/ - GTalk - Dropbox/Box - RelateIQ: http://relateiq.com/ - Help Scout: https://www.helpscout.net/ - HelloSign: https://www.hellosign.com/ We wrote a lot more about how we use them here: https://zapier.com/blog/how-manage-remote-team/

We use HelpScout - https://www.helpscout.net/ Easy to use, good email integration, helpful support.

What do you guys all use for email management between a small 2 person team (founder co-founder)? I've seen that one person has already mentioned https://www.helpscout.net/ I've been using Assistly/Desk http://www.desk.com , but find that it's actually a bit overpowering, and adds a lot of support meta-junk to each email that just makes it looks like we're trying to be an enormous company, when in fact, we don't get that many emails, but at the same time, we want to handle each email efficiently and promptly.

James from Bugsnag here. We make sure to reply to people asap, we've set up Help Scout (https://www.helpscout.net) to manage the replies to these emails, so even if I'm out of the office, my co-founder can jump on and reply. Our target is to reply within 10 minutes, unless we are asleep :)

Vero (http://getvero.com) - email A/B testing & re-marketing Trello (http://trello.com) - task/project/team management Stripe (http://stripe.com) - credit card payment processing Helpscout (http://helpscout.net) - email support system Plus the usual suspects: AWS, GitHub, Mailgun...

Yes this is pretty standard you just check out the email account of john@xyz... from your gmail account. and when answering you can select the from: field. Check this link: https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22370&a… But If I were answering customers emails I would use https://www.helpscout.net It looks pretty cool (I'm not affiliated with the company juest think their product looks very interesting)

Help Scout | Site Reliability Engineer | REMOTE | helpscout.com Apply at https://help-scout.workable.com/jobs/171036 YOUR IMPACT As Help Scout's first dedicated Site Reliability Engineer you will own and define the best practices, tools and automation to ensure our fast growing SaaS provides high availability while increasing engineering velocity. Your work will empower more than 6,000 businesses around the world to deliver a great customer support experience. This is a critical role that will influence every engineer in the company and directly impact our customer's satisfaction. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to build sophisticated continuous delivery and test automation to keep our AWS-based services highly available and fast while increasing the engineering team's velocity. Help Scout engineering is 24 full time engineers organized into 6 teams. You will be a member of a small team with one engineer focused on continuous delivery (CD) pipelines, and 3 engineers focused on our AWS infrastructure and operations. Working with your team, you will partner with our feature delivery teams to build any automation they need to improve site reliability and velocity. You will be responsible for working on our three biggest site reliability priorities: four 9s high availability, continuous delivery and test automation. You will own the implementation and roadmap planning for improvements to our automation, tools and tests to support…

This is currently how Help Scout deploys TLS certificates for Docs sites with custom domains: https://www.helpscout.net/knowledge-base/ I think we're in the ball park of 5000 domains right now.

Disney would like to disagree.[1] [1] http://www.helpscout.net/blog/disney-customer-experience/

These are interesting. Some related things that came into mind are e.g. prices that end in 9 might increase sales (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1023581927405). Or a waiter bringing mints when they give diners their checks increases tips significantly (http://www.helpscout.net/blog/the-psychology-of-personalization-how-wa…

> It still not easy, people were used to candles at that time. Edison did not study the candle making process or the problems of people with candles. His genius was in putting together the solution. ^This, and this http://www.helpscout.net/blog/why-steve-jobs-never-listened-to-his-cus…

1. Tweet surveys out to hashtags. 2. Go (literally, physically) to places where your customers hang out. (Starbucks.) 3. Post in Facebook groups you think your customers would Like. 4. Post in LinkedIn groups you think professionals who'd buy your tool would participate in. 5. etc. There are so many examples out there. Just brew some coffee, Google "how to get customer feedback", and take notes for an hour. You'll be set for at least a week of experiments. * http://blog.kissmetrics.com/best-ways-to-get-feedback/ * https://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-feedback/ * http://www.desk.com/blog/customer-feedback/ * http://blog.crazyegg.com/2013/09/17/customer-reviews-that-convert/ * http://insideintercom.io/3-rules-for-customer-feedback/

A while ago, I listened to a Mixergy interview with the founder of HelpScout. They have a content marketing strategy, and produce a lot of quality free content on customer service issues. https://www.helpscout.net/resources/

Hipchat (http://hipchat.com) - team collaboration Stripe (http://stripe.com) - payments Mandrill (http://mandrill.com) - email Tinfoil Security (http://tinfoilsecurity.com) - web security Help Scout (http://helpscout.net) - help desk / customer support

1) Startups/business. If you haven't, I would read all of Paul Grahams essays. I think startups are a great option (http://www.collegeanswerz.com/risks-and-rewards-of-startups), but even if you don't end up starting one, you should understand the business. I would also highly recommend reading Rework. 2) Your site. The top part (good design is good business) and the footer (contact me) are solid, but the rest could use a lot of work. The periods in the 'Hi there' paragraph are on the next line. Could just be my browser, but something you should look into. That paragraph definitely should be "nicer". Maybe something like this: http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/2.3.2/examples/carousel.html. The design of the case study is solid. The main problem with your site I think is the lack of information. Tell us more about yourself. What you do? What are your aspirations? Hobbies? Thoughts/opinions? Show us that you know design and programming by telling us your philosophies. Also, have a blog (http://nathanmarz.com/blog/break-into-silicon-valley-with-a-blog-1.htm… 3) Design resources. I'm new to programming and design too (~ 1 year of on and off experience), but there are some resources that have helped me a lot. - Definitely learn bootstrap (http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/index.html). - Best resource on typography (http://practicaltypography.com/) - Best resource on color (https://www.helpscout.net/blog/psychology-of-color/) - Amazing…

I've been assembling a list of these lately for a book that I'm working on. (http://startingandsustaining.com) Some of the categories are fairly loose as some apps don't fit nicely into categorical buckets, but hopefully this is a helpful list. --Browser/Email Testing BrowserStack (http://www.browserstack.com) Litmus (http://litmus.com) --Bug/Issue Tracking BugHerd (http://bugherd.com) Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com) Sifter (http://sifterapp.com) (Disclaimer: I built this.) --Planning & Project Management Sprintly (http://sprint.ly) Podio (https://podio.com) Flow (http://www.getflow.com) Interstate (http://interstateapp.com) Basecamp (http://basecamp.com) Apollo (http://www.apollohq.com) Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com) Asana (http://www.asana.com) Trello (https://trello.com) Blossom (https://www.blossom.io) Trajectory (https://www.apptrajectory.com) --Business & Traffic Analytics KissMetrics (http://kissmetrics.com) MixPanel (http://mixpanel.com) DigMyData (http://digmydata.com) --Continuous Integration / Code Quality Travis (https://travis-ci.org) Circle (http://circleci.com) CodeClimate (http://codeclimate.com) Sempaphore (https://semaphoreapp.com) --Dashboards Ducksboard (http://ducksboard.com) Geckoboard (http://www.geckoboard.com) Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com) --Error/Exception Handling Sentry (https://getsentry.com) Coalmine (https://www.getcoalmine.com) HoneyBadger (https://www.honeybadger.io) BugSnag…